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Sauce

Cucumber Sauce for Cutlets or Beef

A cucumber sauce made with cucumbers, vinegar, stock, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Cucumber Sauce for Cutlets or Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cucumbers

  1. Peel and thinly slice the cucumbers into 3-inch pieces, removing any seeds and rounding the ends.

  2. In a bowl, combine cold water, pepper, salt, and vinegar, then add the cucumber pieces.

  3. After a short time, remove the cucumbers and place them in a stewpan with a little of your best stock.

Finish the sauce

  1. Boil the cucumbers down to a glaze, then add brown sauce, lemon juice, black pepper, sugar, and salt.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Cucumber + vinegartop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,734 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

  3. Cucumber + lemontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Cucumber + peppertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,991 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Sauce + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Cucumbers
Provide the main body and fresh flavor of the sauce once cooked down.
Vinegar
Adds sharp acidity that softens the cucumbers and brightens the sauce.
Sugar
Balances the acidity and sharpness of the vinegar and lemon.
Lemon juice
Adds bright acidity that lifts the flavor of the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Boil the cucumbers down to a glaze. Cucumbers release a lot of water, so they must be reduced fully until thick and glossy. If the liquid is not cooked off, the sauce stays thin and watery and the flavors are diluted.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cucumber, pepper, vinegar, sauce, sugar):

  1. Limefits about as well
  2. Avocadofits about as well
  3. Cherryfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, pepper, vinegar, sauce, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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